Opening of envelopes and extraction and handling of their contents represents a significant labour cost for credit card companies, utilities and other organizations that receive large volumes of mail. For example, a credit card company or the like may receive tens of thousands of envelopes each day. Every envelope must be opened and its contents must be extracted, checked, sorted and processed. Many of the envelopes will contain an invoice or a remittance advice and a corresponding cheque. In some cases, one or other of these items will be missing or there will be a discrepancy between the cheque and the amount on the remittance advice; in other cases, correspondence will be included.
While the envelopes can be opened automatically, extraction of their contents and subsequent processing is usually performed manually. An analysis by the Bank Administration Institute in 1968 identified eight different categories into which incoming mail would be sorted in a typical remittance processing operation. That study showed that the average processing time for each piece of mail was 9.98 seconds after the envelope had been opened and that 5.88 seconds of this time was required to obtain the envelope and remove its contents. This corresponds to processing of only 361 items per hour for each operator. Since delays in processing remittances represent lost bank interest, organizations that receive large volumes of mail employ large numbers of operators to ensure that remittances reach the bank promptly.
Not only is the labour cost significant but the type of work (repetitious manual work) has recently been identified as a possible cause of health problems in employees -- see for example Item Processing Report (ISSN 1048-5120) published by Phillips Publishing Inc. of Maryland, U.S.A.